If you are planning to start a business or nonprofit organization, one of the biggest challenges that you will face is securing funding.

There are many ways to get funding for your venture, and you can determine which funding option best meets your needs by doing some research.

Here is a look at some of the funding options that are availableÂ .

Loans

Getting a loan is the most common way of raising money for a new business.

One thing you can do to find a suitable loan opportunity is to contact the Small Business Administration (SBA).

There are a number of specialized loan options for you to choose from, ranging from startup loans to microloans. SBA loans are usually easier to secure than bank loans because they have less stringent requirements.

If you decide to get a loan from a bank, it is advisable that you start with smaller banks in your locality. These banks will have a better understanding of how your business will fit into the local landscape.

If you are starting a non-profit organization, you can try to get a loan from funding sources such as the Nonprofit Finance Fund, as well as banks and other financial institutions.

Grants

Grants are usually offered by the public sector or charitable organizations, and they do not have to be repaid. Since they are pursued by many organizations, they are extremely difficult to secure.

Grants can come in many forms, including business startup grants, business expansion grants, research grants, financial education grants and others. There are grants that are specifically offered to aspiring owners or owners of certain types of organizations, as well as demographic groups such as women, minorities, single parents and others.

As such, it is a good idea to define your niche before you apply for a grant.

You can increase your chances of getting a grant by creating a detailed business plan that shows how your organization will stand out from others.

Federal, state and local governments offer a wide range of grant programs for businesses and nonprofit organizations, and you can find out about these grants by doing research on the Internet or contacting your state or local government offices. Grants can also be obtained from organizations such as the National Financial Educators Council.

Crowd-funding is becoming an increasingly popular method of obtaining funding for starting businesses and nonprofit organizations.

Presently, there are many crowd-funding websites that provide excellent platforms for organizations to locate startup funds. However, the increased popularity of crowd-funding also means greater competition.

In order to raise enough money for your start-up, you need to devise effective strategies to attract the attention of investors.

Securing funding for your new business or nonprofit organization does not have to be a complicated task.

If you can create a good business plan and make a great pitch, you will significantly improve your odds of getting the funding you need.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of iosphere at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from social media marketing to Cloud computing.

There are plenty of factors to consider when it comes to business success: finances, networking, expansion, etc.

However, while these are important matters, there is one matter that is usually overlooked even though it has the ability to make or break the companyÂyour workplaceÂs atmosphere.

The health of your company is dependent upon the health of your team, for your business will only go as far as your team promotes it.

Here are a few tips to creating an inviting, successful work environment:

1. Organize

Because there often feels like there is too little time in a day to accomplish everything you need to, you often spread yourself and your employees too thin. Instead of focusing 100 percent of your attention on one task at hand, you spread your focus over too many issues, which leads to disorganization and poor business performance.

Instead, set a schedule and stick to it. Be organized about what needs to be done, when it needs to be, and how it should be done. Set the precedent for your workplace by being organized and delegating tasks efficiently. Do an online company check to see how other business competitors are managing and learn from their actions.

2. Reduce Stress

Whether your business is a brand new start-up or a well-oiled machine, it is crucial to alleviate employee stress. A chaotic atmosphere is overwhelming, which can lead to severe stress. When you and your team are under duress, you are more susceptible to sickness, to financial errors, and business mistakes, among others. According to a Harvard Medical School study of stress, stress can often harm a person Âphysically, emotionally, and psychologically.Â

Getting a handle on stress is the first step. Find a technique or activity that relaxes you and work that into both your routine and your teamÂs routine. Even in a high-pressure work environment, make sure you emphasize the importance of taking breaks during the workday and relaxing.

3. Goal Oriented

Establish goals and deadlines for you company. You can easily track your companyÂs success when you have goals that are measurable. Moreover, goals and deadlines help to keep you and your team focused on the tasks at hand. Begin by establishing (on paper) goals you want to accomplish six months or a year from now. Create incentives for your team to keep them working hard and focused. For example, offer your team a bonus if you reach your financial goal. It will keep both you and your team motivated while furthering your businessÂs success.

4. Comfortable Environment

An environment conducive to success will motivate you and your team. The workplace should be efficient and comfortableÂemotionally and physically. Keep the office space at a comfortable temperature and at a comfortable mood. Stress the importance of being a team, which will hopefully dispel any negativity or competition amongst co-workers. Additionally, try to make the office space relaxing by making it as bright and airy as possible and having a designated area as a break room.

Image Source: www.wgal.com

About the Author: TedÂ LevinÂ is a freelance journalist covering business topics for a variety of websites. He enjoys writing about startup challenges and company culture.Â

A System to Save Time

When you run a blog, there are some things you can’t help but spend a ton of time and energy on. Coming up with new posts, fiddling with the template, talking to readers, publishing videos of funny cats you found on YouTube and just had to share…these are the important elements in the life of the average blogger.

Certainly, the last thing you want to waste time on is organization. Yet every time most of us set out to organize things, we tend to spend all day on the process. Getting sorted turns out to be more of a hassle and hour eater than remaining in a frazzles state of chaos!

This is one of the biggest traps that bloggers tend to fall into. What you need a system in place for organizing things in a timely matter. Here are some tips to help you do just that.

Create a List – When you have a list to follow, you will be less tempted to veer off into unnecessary or unimportant areas in the name of organization. This will keep you from wasting time you don’t have where it isn’t needed. Try to keep your list of goals sorted from most to least important, and never move from one item to the next until you have completed that goal.

Set A Timer – Calculate how much time you can dedicated to fulfilling that list, and stick to that time. If there is too much to do, break it up over the course of several days or even weeks, and follow by that schedule. You don’t have to get everything done at once, after all.

Don’t Allow Distractions – I am a huge procrastinator. I can’t help it, as I tend to have the attention span of a fruit fly. Sometimes I start doing something else without even realizing I have taken my eyes off my work. A simple way to avoid this while organizing is by using a program like LeechBlock or StayFocused. This will keep you from surfing the web and getting distracted while you work.

Have Background Noise – This might sound a little silly, but I have always found it much easier to remain focused if I have the right kind of background music playing while I do my task. Whether it is better for most to have something classical in the background for its gentle tones and lack of lyrics, anything that motivates you and lets you think can work. Try a playlist site, like 8Tracks or Last.fm.

Keep Things Organized – The easiest way to keep from wasting time on organization is by keeping things organized. Spending a few minutes here and there making sure everything is as it should be has the same effect as spending fifteen minutes cleaning an area a day. It keeps it from getting overwhelming.

Three Tools For Organization

Evernote – Keep track of clippings from anywhere on the web, and view it in your browser, on your desktop or on your phone. Easy to use, and it can save small bits of text, pictures, links or full pages.

HootSuite – Monitor all of your social media accounts, stats and followers in one place. This is a social media dashboard that can save a lot of time and effort.

Pocket – Originally called Read It Later, this is a plugin that works by saving pages you wanted to read for when you aren’t busy. You can access it through your browser, on your phone or any media device connected to the web.

You don’t have to spend a whole lot of time organizing your blog. It just takes a bit of planning and thought, and you will be done quicker than you thought possible.

Author’s Bio:Ann Smarty is a blogger and guest blogger with 6 years experience. She is a control freak and she loves when she is busy, so her hands are always full. One of her largest projects is My Blog Guest, the free community of guest authors and blog owners who preach the “high-quality” approach to guest blogging. Follow Ann on Twitter at @seosmarty and Google Plus

Put a Sock in It, Julie!

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
When you read you begin with ABC, When you sing you begin with do-re-me.

–the character, Maria, sung by Julie Andrews inThe Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein

Put a sock in it, Julie.

Starting in the beginning might work well when you know the story, but when you’re first forming your ideas it can really screw you up. By the time you figure out that clever beginning you might forget the what the story was going to be about. After all, when planning a special occasion, it’s not usually the best idea to start with what you’ll say on the invitation … we have to know what the gathering will be about.

Turn off, Julie Andrews and the tape recordings in your head that tell you what you’re supposed to do. They just get in the way. Unique problems require unique solutions.

Beginnings Have a Part to Play in Setting Up Your Conversation

Who cares about how the fire began if you need to get out of the building NOW? Get the facts and worry about how it started later.

When you’re creating something new, problem solving, or envisioning what could be, information is nebulous and coming from many directions. The challenge is to order it and give form–not to find the beginning. Here are some tips on how to get your idea going before the blank screen and the beginning knock you down.

Write your idea as a compelling question you want to answer. Then write the answer as – bullet points.

Describe an action that you’re looking to make happen.

Write the list of important points that you want to share.

Outline the steps of the how-to.

Lay out the key point of the product review.

If you do one of those first, you’ll know what it is that you want to say.

Then, you can consider one of two things key to context:

Connecting to prior knowledge: What will most of your audience already know about what you’re going to tell them? How can you connect that to what you’re adding to the conversation? That connection is the place to start.

Building background: It might be a fair assessment that most of your audience won’t have experience with what you’re about to tell them. What information or analogy will give them a setting in which to place your conversation? Make that setting the beginning.

Now the beginning is an integral part to play in setting up your most important statements.

Do you ever start in the middle when you’re preparing a report, a blog post, or a presentation?

A Guest Post by Lior Levin

The Internet has put more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, at the same time, given us more to remember. As great as the digital age has been, itâs also been a nightmare for organization, giving us more mental clutter than we ever thought possible.

Fortunately, developers are finding new ways to use the Web to help people stay organized. In every area from finance to news, new Web-based tools are cropping up to help you stay organized and avoid information overload.

Though they target different challenges, their goals are are all the same: Filter out the information that one doesnât need and ensure that the info you do need is available and easily accessible.

Being on the Web means that we have an ever-increasing contact list and those contacts have an also-increasing number of means of contact. Between email, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and more, it can be hard to keep track of who we know, where they are and what they are up to.

Gist, however, makes it easy, by syncing up with your various accounts, it unifies your contact list into one easily-digested list that is sorted by importance and includes all means of contact.

As great as online banking is, most of us have multiple accounts and our finances spread across more and more companies. Fortunately, Mint makes it easy to view all of these accounts in one place, by accessing your various banking, loans and credit accounts and then displaying the information in one place, making it easier than ever to get a clear picture of your finances.

Best of all, since Gist automatically categorizes your purchases, you can easily see where your money is going and where you can save money.

If you use more than one computer, the frustration of having to more files from one machine to another are well-known. Though flash drives and email can help, they are clunky and slow solutions. Fortunately, Dropbox can help.

Dropbox automatically synchronizes files between computers, without you having to do anything. It just runs in the background and when a file is changed on one computer, the other machines on the account get the update almost instantly. Also great for collaboration and backup.

If you are like most people, you have at least a few different social networking profiles spread across several different sites. Keeping track of them all can be a huge pain. Fortunately, Tweetdeckâs new Chrome Application, which is a Web-based HTML5 app, lets you follow your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare accounts and more all from one multi-column pane.

Best of all, with merged columns you can get all of your private communications (IE: Twitter DMs and Facebook messages) in one stream, regardless of where they came from.

Though Google Docs is best known as a tool for editing and creating files on the Web, through features like easy sharing, folders and document upload, it is also a way to organize and access your critical files anywhere you need them.

While it isnât ideal for all document types, most simple documents can be easily used with Google Docs, making it a natural way to keep your files handy, no matter where you are.

Between our Twitter streams, RSS feeds and other sites we follow, many of us have far more links in our inbox than we could ever read. Zite, which is currently in closed beta, calls itself âYour Personal Web Filterâ and it goes through all of that to find the stories most important and most interesting for you.

Most interesting of all, Zite learns from your behavior and is always honing its approach to what you find interesting, making it a tool that gets better the more you use it.

Busy people have a lot of deadlines but keeping track of those deadlines can be a real pain. Though calendars can help, especially with meetings and appointments, there are many tasks that just arenât right for calendars like laundry or sending out birthday cards.

Producteev helps organize those tasks and, through integration with email, IM and an iPhone app, makes it easy to ad tasks and receive updates on them. is also great for managers who need to assign tasks and deadlines to a team as it has a built-in function for group management as well.

In the end, the Web has both done more to make our lives more cluttered and more to simplify it than any innovation before. We have more information being thrown at us than we ever thought possible and more ways to sort, organize and parse it than we did just a few years ago.

When itâs all said and done, the Web is just a tool and weâll get out of it exactly what we put into it. If we let it drive us to insanity, it can do so. But if we make it a tool to organize and streamline our lives, it can do that just as easily.

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”—A.A. Milne

I am not a tidy person. My Gorgeous wife sometimes refers to me as a “messy”

Really what she means is that I don’t continuously reorganize stuff like she does. I have a tendency to put things down and then not pick them up again until I need to use them.

Of course that time may never come.

Hence the clutter that I tend to accumulate along with labels like “messy”.

The good news was I could pretty much find anything I set down because it was located right where I left it. I could reach down through the various strata on my desk right into the exact level where the piece of paper I needed and retrieve it in a moment. It was arguably faster than if I had to go find a perfectly labeled file in a drawer.

At least it used to be.

Now I live with an organizer. Rarely do I find things where I left them. They get put away, moved, organized, or even {gasp} thrown out!

Before you get all on my wife’s case, things are much tidier than when I lived on my own. I’m no longer embarrassed by clutter when folks come to visit. It is definitely a good trade.

A Dichotomy

There is, however a weird, almost schizophrenic, part of me that tends to be highly organized at work.

I’ve had to be over the years because of the things I’ve done and the positions I’ve held.

Very strange that I’ve never seemed to bring that quality home with me.

Even as a kid I was a “messy”. When I was a teenager my mom gave me a little poster with that A.A. Milne quote on it. Of course I didn’t realize that’s who said it even though I was quite familiar with his stories.

Yet I did OK in school.

It’s like there’s two Chrises (What is the correct plural form of a name like Chris? Chris’s? Chrises? Chrisssses?)

Where was I. Oh, yes. Two of me. Anyway the whole thing seems strange, that I can be very organized in one environment and very much less than organized in another.

But the cool thing is that I am constantly making exciting discoveries at home!

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